Today's guest post comes from Shannen Dee Williams. Williams is the 2013-2014 Postdoctoral
Fellow in African-American studies at Case Western Reserve University in
Cleveland, Ohio. In the fall of 2014, she will join the faculty of the University
of Tennessee at Knoxville as an assistant professor of United States and
African-American history. Williams is currently revising her book
manuscript, “Subversive Habits: Black Nuns and the Struggle to Desegregate
Catholic America after World War I.” When completed, it will be the first
historical monograph on African-American Catholic sisters in the twentieth
century. Her research has been supported by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral
Fellowship (in Religion and Ethics) from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation, an Albert J. Beveridge Grant from the American Historical
Association, the Huggins-Quarles Award from the Organization of American
Historians, the Drusilla Dunjee Houston Award from the Association of Black
Women Historians, and the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award from the American
Catholic Historical Association. A slightly edited version of this blog post appeared on The Feminist Wire on October 24, 2013. (Posted by Karen Johnson)

“Young lady, you just
told my story. In 1952, I was denied admission to the Sisters of Saint Joseph
[of Carondelet] in Buffalo, New York solely on the basis of race. I was one of
the broken hearts that you mentioned.”

Those
were the first words spoken to me by Elaine Marie Clyburn on March 21, 2012. I
had just delivered a lecture on the history of African-American Catholic
sisters at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, and I was
preparing to leave the facility when the regal 77-year old Catholic woman stopped
me in my tracks.

“Some people do not believe me when I tell them the
sisters rejected me because I was black.” she continued. “But, it is the truth. I was explicitly
told that I could not enter the Sisters of Saint Joseph because of my color and
only because of my color.”

Jolted
by Ms. Clyburn’s unsolicited testimony, I stood silent for several seconds
while I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. My research on the
politics of racial segregation in U.S. Catholic female religious life had long
before alerted me to the reality that there were likely hundreds of
African-American women still alive who had suffered the humiliation and
heartbreak of racist rejection by the nation’s historically white sisterhoods. Indeed,
in the previous five years, I had interviewed over thirty of them and unearthed
the names and testimonies of scores more in a host of congregational, diocesan,
and archdiocesan archives across the country.

Yet, I
was totally unprepared to meet Ms. Clyburn. Up until that moment, the oral
history interviews that I had collected were from African-American women who
had become sisters despite the racial barriers and obstacles enacted by white
congregations. Most of these women were members of the nation’s predominantly
black Catholic sisterhoods, which had since the early nineteenth century preserved
and nurtured the vocations of black Catholic women barred from entering white
(and indigenous) congregations throughout the Americas and Carribean. The rest were members or
ex-members of predominantly white sisterhoods, who always made note of their
congregation’s previous (and in certain cases ongoing) history of racial
exclusion.

However,
Ms. Clyburn was different. She was one of the Church’s lost vocations, and for a moment, this revelation took my breath
away. “Yes,
Ma’am,” I finally said to Ms. Clyburn. “I know, and now you know, you were not
the exception. You were the rule.” A couple
of weeks later, I collected Ms. Clyburn’s oral history and soon learned that her
devastating rejection from the Sisters of Saint Joseph (CSJ) in 1952 had
initially followed a very familiar storyline.

Like
hundreds of African-American women and girls denied admission into the ranks of
the historically white sisterhoods of their Catholic educators, Ms. Clyburn had
been advised by the local CSJ superior to seek admission into one of the
nation’s black congregations. However, she ultimately decided not enter religious
life. The fact that her white classmates called to religious life could apply
to and enter their first-choice congregation without giving a second thought to
their color never sat right with her. The reality that black women could be
cooks and maids in white convents, but not sisters, also made her uneasy.

Instead,
Ms. Clyburn enrolled in Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York as the Jesuit
institution’s first black female student and graduated in 1956. After earning a
master’s degree from Howard University in 1958, Ms. Clyburn began a distinguished career in social service and higher education.
She also became active in the Catholic interracial and civil rights movements.

After
suffering the humiliation of “having to sit in the back of a southern [white]
Catholic Church” and “going to Communion last” in the 1960s, Ms. Clyburn
briefly abandoned Catholicism and became a Quaker. However, her longing for the
sacraments and rituals of Catholicism eventually carried her back to her native
Church,and she soon made Catholic history
again. In 1982, Ms. Clyburn became the first associate member of the Erie,
Pennsylvania chapter of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, helping to begin the healing
process for a grievous wrong committed by the congregation 30 years before.*

At the
end of our conversation, Ms. Clyburn thanked me for allowing her the
opportunity to finally “open [her] alabaster box.” She also provided me with a
photograph of her taken on the day of her graduation from Mount Saint Joseph
Academy in Buffalo in 1952. (She was the school’s first African-American
student.) In the image, Ms. Clyburn is standing next to Sister Agnes Clare, the
woman who had first helped to awaken Ms. Clyburn’s call to serve God as a
religious, but ultimately refused to challenge her order’s policy of racial
segregation. “It devastated me,” she said. “And many in the
Church pretend like it never happened.”

***

As I
reflected on the recent exposure of the racially discriminatory admissions policies of four historically white Greek sororities at the University of Alabama,
I could not help but think of Ms. Clyburn and her struggle to tell her story and
be heard by all. I also could not help but wonder if the outcome in Tuscaloosa
would have been different if it had been the rejected African-American women
who had dared to come forward and expose the sororities’ racist admissions policies
insteadofa few
courageous white sorority members. Would the testimonies of the two high-achieving
and widely popular black applicants have been deemed valid by student editors
of the campus newspaper and the university’s president without white
corroboration? Would the case have made the same national and international
headlines?

The
current state of American race relations suggests not. Indeed, when asked about
the recent controversy, one white Alabama alumna steadfastly denied the
allegations. Other sorority members simply refused to comment. However, the
abysmal lack of racial diversity in their ranks in the face of 50 years of public
desegregation cannot be ignored. The same can also be said for the nation’s
oldest sororities.

Despite
the proliferation of scholarship on U.S. Catholic sisters in the last three
decades, race remains widely under-utilized as a category of analysis in the
history of female religious life. Moreover, the long and largely unsuccessful
African-American struggle to integrate white Catholic sisterhoods remains one
of the most under-researched and least-reported on topics in American religious
history. As a result, the inability, and in many cases unwillingness, of white
congregations to confront and deal seriously with racism within their ranks has been rendered largely
invisible in the annals of history.

Indeed, most
studies of Catholic sisters fail to document the existence of the racially exclusionary
admission policies of white congregations. The few studies that do, generally mention
the policies briefly and grossly dismiss their impact and the ideology of white
supremacy on the racial makeup of the national population of sisters and the quality of life in convents. (Notable
exceptions include Diane Batts Morrow’s Persons
of Color and Religious at the Same Time, Lara Medina’s Las
Hermanas,
and Amy Koehlinger’s New
Nuns.) However,
that does not mean that there is not ample evidence and documentation to
demonstrate otherwise.

In 1949,
Father Raymond Bernard, a white Jesuit priest, began studying racial
segregation in U.S. Catholic sisterhoods. Between 1951 and 1957, he conducted three
questionnaire surveys among the nation’s female congregations in order to
ascertain their policies regarding the “admission of qualified Negro girls.”
Father Bernard’s findings clearly documented the persistence of racially
discriminatory admissions policies in the vast majority of white congregations
even in the wake of the Brown decision
and ongoing Vatican calls to open their ranks to African American women. The Jesuit priest
also partly attributed the female vocational crisis then sweeping the Church to
the exclusionary admissions policies of white orders. “Many…institutes which
complain about the scarcity of vocations have drawn a color-line on would be
applicants, yet continue to pray for more vocations to arrive at their door,”
he wrote in America in 1956.

The fact
that most white congregations never accepted an African-American candidate or
had a perpetually professed African-American sister in the twentieth century belies
any claim of universality or equality in U.S. female religious life. Moreover,
the oral history testimonies of pioneer black sisters in white congregations reveal
that many endured years of racist bullying, taunts, and neglect in their
orders.

Some,
like the pioneer black members of the Sisters of Saint Mary (now the Franciscan
Sisters of Mary) in Saint Louis, Missouri, were initially forced to enter the
back doors of their motherhouse, live in segregated quarters, and profess their
vows separately from their white counterparts, among many other humiliating
abuses.

First Three African-American Sisters of St. Mary
(now the Franciscan Sisters of Mary) in 1946

Segregated Profession Ceremony of the First Five
African-American Sisters of St. Mary, c. 1947

The
refusal of some white sisters to speak to their black counterparts or use the
same toilets, utensils, and accommodations subjected many black sisters to a
daily ritual of shame and humiliation which was generally endured with a host
of masked smiles and deferential behaviors. As Pittsburgh’s first black Religious Sister
of Mercy M. Martin de Porres Grey revealed in an interview from the late 1960s,
“When I cried in my room at night, I made sure nobody knew it. When I was with
the sisters, or anybody for that matter, I kept smiling through my hurt.”

Many
black sisters in white congregations also felt pressured to deny and degrade
their racial heritage in order to feel accepted in their communities. In the
late sixties, pioneer black School Sister of Saint Francis Daniel Marie Myles,
for example, confessed to having prayed to God to make her white during her
novitiate years in hopes that her white counterparts would be friendly to her.
“I tried to act and talk and live white, because it was the only way I’d be
accepted at all in the convent,” she stated. “And I forgot my own culture, my
own black parents down South, and tried my best to be what the white nuns
wanted me to…The other sisters always laughed at me for the way I talked and
walked. And I tried not to resent their laughter. In fact, I tried to laugh
right along with them.”

African-American
Sister of the Blessed Sacrament Christine Nesmith aptly described the
travails of many black sisters in white congregations when she famously said, “Entering
an order meant ceasing to be black and looking on what you grew up with as
uncouth. You could do the Irish jig, but anything African was taboo.”

Following
the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the formation
of the National Black Sisters’
Conference in
1968, many African-American Catholic sisters began to testify publicly about the
racist abuses to which they were subjected in the Church. They also publicly
challenged the sincerity of white sisters active in the civil rights movement,
pointing out that many held racially derogatory views of African Americans and
stridently resisted the integration of their own congregations. As
African-American Sister of the Blessed Sacrament Anna Cox told her audience at
a regional meeting of the Sister-Formation Conference in 1969, “Whites who
attempt to teach…black [people]…how to love God and their fellowmen, yet refuse
themselves to accept black candidates, to truly accept them, shout by their
actions if not by their words, the pharisaical attitude denounced by Christ,
‘Don’t do as I do, do as I say.’”

However,
few congregations were willing to listen and change.** As a result, scores of
black sisters departed religious life, decimating their already marginal national
population. Many white congregations lost all or most of their African American members. While some black sisters left on their own accord or in explicit protest, like Cincinnati’s Sister Melanie
Willingham, many
others in temporary vows were dismissed from their communities as a result of
their public testimonies and activism, underscoring the ever-dangerous
consequences of racial truth-telling for African Americans.

Keeping
that in mind then, let us continue to applaud the courageous students and
administrators at the University of Alabama for standing up for social justice and telling a
racial truth that has long marred their campus. Let us also remember to keep a
close eye on the situation in Tuscaloosa in the years to come. After all, history
tells us that we should. We owe at least that much to the young black women across
the country seeking to enter historically white Greek sororities. We also owe
it to the hundreds of African-American Catholic sisters and rejected laywomen
still living and laboring in our midst.

****

* The Erie chapter of the Sisters of Saint Joseph accepted
its first four associate members in 1982. Ms. Clyburn was the first
alphabetically.** One notable example is the congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, who in 2008 elected Sister Teresita Weind, a foundress of the National Black Sisters' Conference, as their global leader.

Thanks for your post Shannen. I'm happy to see more work on such an under researched topic. I look forward to reading your book when it's published.In addition to the books you mention like Koehliner's The New Nuns, readers might also be interested in Edward Brett's *The New Orleans Sisters of the Holy Family* which explores the 20th century missionary work of African-American nuns in Belize.